Also, I don't think there is one precise answer. The people who remain famous today were not the only ones well known in their time. Another factor is time it's hard to gauge "famousness" through the lens of history. How you define "famous" is obviously going to influence how you answer this question. was publicly and visibly gay (acknowledged it publicly or had confirmed and acknowledged ties to same sex lovers) 3.
#FAMOUS GAY MEN HISTORY FREE#
actively identified as gay (either of his free will or had been publicly outed and had confirmed that outing) 2. So because of these factors the answer to your question would likely be someone quite recent. And yet a large segment of the population was oblivious (or willfully ignorant.) Someone with that level of "obvious gayness" today would not go unnoticed. Now we are all attuned to signals of gayness and it's very easy to read him as gay. Think about Liberace and his fierce closet. Most importantly gay people have become more visible to straight people as gay visibility has increased. This is something that has become more and more prevalent over time. This makes it easier to recognize gay people who are not out. This means both that we are more aware of gay people and that we are better at picking up on signals of gayness.
Gay visibility: going hand in hand with identity and outness, visibility of gay people has increased over the last fifty years. Coming out as a political tactic and as a widespread practice, did not really get going until after Stonewall (not to say that people did not come out before.) AIDS brought a new level of outness in the late eighties and nineties as the illness forced gay men out of closets and groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation celebrated gay identity.ģ. Public acceptance of homosexuality and coming out inform and influence each other - the more out people, the more the public comes to accept them the more society accepts gay people, the more people come out. Outness and public knowledge: The idea of being "out" as we understand it today is an even newer concept. So the idea of a "gay" person, as you describe would only apply to fairly recent times (and is also a primarily western concept.)Ģ. That is to say that people did not see the gender of their sex partners as a factor in their identity. Historically, homosexuality was something someone did, not something they were. Gayness as identity: Something I talk about a lot on this sub is the newness of the concept of homosexuality as an identity. This is a difficult question to answer for a couple reasons.ġ. Previous AMAs | Previous Roundtables Featuresįeature posts are posted weekly. May 25th | Panel AMA with /r/AskBibleScholars Please Subscribe to our Google Calendar for Upcoming AMAs and Events To nominate someone else as a Quality Contributor, message the mods. Our flaired users have detailed knowledge of their historical specialty and a proven record of excellent contributions to /r/AskHistorians.
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